Editor’s Note:

Following story was published in October 2004 by Filipinas Magazine and judged runnerup in the 2005 New California Media Excellence in Journalism Awards. It is reprinted with permission from Filipinas Magazine.

By Cherie M. Querol Moreno

Out of the shadows, they rose to the light on center stage. Before a thousand pairs of eyes, they embraced their past and acknowledged the approval of their new admirers, some of whom had heard their names but never knew of their anguish.

Of the seven women honored as “Vagina Warriors” by the Filipina Women’s Network at its first-ever all-Filipino production of “The Vagina Monologues March” 30 in San Francisco, five survived different forms of family violence. All have healed. Each is a singular tale. Three agreed to break the silence in this Filipinas exclusive.

NEW BEGINNING

Evangeline Canonizado Buell was 10 when her father rescued her from virtual imprisonment: For six months, she had been living in a dark bedroom closet, in near starvation, her body a host for pustules.

A singer, guitarist and writer, seventyish Vangie is a board member of Berkeley Art Center, the Asian Pacific Advisory Committee of the Oakland Museum, and chapter president of the Filipino American National Historical Society. She was public events manager of the International House of the University of California at Berkeley and program coordinator of the Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley.

With husband Bill Buell, daughters Danni, Nikki and Stacey Vilas, and grandchildren Quiana, Brielle and Joshua, Vangie basks in her “wonderful” filial ties.

She can’t say the same for her own childhood, for she was abused by her mother from the time she was four.

“I was beaten, pinched black and blue,” Vangie recalls. “She hit me with a leather belt and hard slippers, saying I did not behave and needed spanking. I felt extremely confused and wondered how to be good to make her stop.”

Her father was often overseas with the U.S. Navy.

“I would tell my dad I had been a bad girl and Mama spanked me,” Vangie would report to him during home visits. His recurring response: “Be good now, so Mama won’t spank you anymore.”

As soon as her father left, her mother would repeat the scenario.

“She would grab the flesh of my upper thigh, twisting it deliberately, excruciatingly, yelling ‘Why aren’t you a good girl! You are bad, you have no father!’ Then she’d relentlessly belt me. I begged her to stop, promising her I would be good.”

The caged child ate crackers and tea; sardines would be a feast. Her father decided to take her away to live with her grandmother one day and only then did Vangie see the wounds oozing from her body, relics of her confinement.

Those wounds ran deep.

“I harbored feelings of guilt, worthlessness and low self-esteem,” Vangie says.
“I felt I caused my mother’s mental illness,” she adds, regretting that “children’s counseling was unavailable in the 1940s. That would have helped me considerably. And although I was loved and cared for by my grandmother and father, they did not understand my mother’s illness and how deeply I was affected.”

Vangie attributes her healing to counseling in her young adulthood. Despite her ordeal, she feels only compassion for her mother, charging the abusiveness to her mother’s own experience with oppression.

“My mother’s problems were insurmountable,” Vangie declares. “She was born of a Filipino mother and an African American father who went to the Philippines during the Spanish American War. She came to this country in 1925 as a bride of an American soldier who died after she arrived. She endured the life of hardship and tragedy because of prejudice. She was not accepted by either ethnic culture or by then-few Bay Area Filipinos. She barely spoke English, suffered culture shock, loneliness, isolation and homesickness.”

In contemporary lingo, her mother had been “acting out.”

“She was sexually abused by her cousins for five years in the Philippines,” Vangie reveals, “while living with her aunt and uncle after her mother died. They were ashamed of her and treated her as a servant.”

Somehow her father and grandmother’s affections shielded Vangie from irreparable damage. Understanding the intergenerational cycle of abuse, she vowed to end that cycle and build respect and trust in her own family.

“I was concerned about being a good mother because I had had no role model,” she once thought, until she realized that Filipino acquaintances who rushed to her aid were her example. “And the pattern of abuse was ended because I was loved and cherished by the community of people surrounding me.”

PERSONAL CHOICE

Tisa Mendoza, 37, is a self-described “Healthy Living Motivator.” By her definition, she is a “crusader to make healthy living possible for all” through her media company and community presentations. In her work, she has learned as much as she has taught---about life as well as herself.

“Two years ago I was giving a volunteer workshop entitled ‘Body Wisdom’ to East Palo Alto youth,” the Foster City resident says. “One of the teens was sharing the story of a friend who was raped.”

For the first time, Tisa was moved to share her story publicly. Her young audience “reacted surprised” by her disclosure, “but I felt they were able to relate to me better and not just look at me as a grown-up.”

“My experience isn’t the primary emphasis of what I do today, but I am a self-health advocate so that would include not accepting violence,” she explains. “Being healthy means taking care of yourself and demanding that people respect who you are.”

Tisa was 15 when she was forced into having sex with two boys. A little while later, she was raped by a group of schoolmates and their friends.

“A girlfriend and I were already drunk coming from a convenience store and we ended up playing a drinking game,” she relates the incident. “Next thing I knew I was upstairs, on the floor, getting raped. I had my period and one by one the boys raped me. I was coming in and out of it, totally aware of what was happening but unable to stop it.”

A friend later picked her up and took her to the friend’s home where rage, pain and humiliation raced through the screaming Tisa, who had hoped for sympathy from a male friend who was at the house at the time. To her disbelief, the fellow proved to be no friend, attempting to engage Tisa in another unwanted sexual episode.

The next day, Tisa found out she had been branded. Word spread throughout school--- not that she was sexually assaulted but that she had willingly participated in group sex.

Few teens would argue that campus tattle can be lethal. Tisa barely survived the effects of the calumny.

“Every day to numb myself I would get drunk, high, you name it,” she recalls her means of escape. “I started cutting school and eventually dropped out, got my G.E. D. and went to junior college. I never got a degree. For years I would refer to myself as a whore, a loser. I thought that was all I was. I let any guy have me. I did things I despised. I hated myself, my life. I thought God was punishing me.”

At 19 she opened up to her boyfriend Robert, who urged her to file a police report. She did. She also told her mother.

“My mother reacted as any loving parent would,” she says. “She hurt for me,” unlike the police, whose response offended her. “They were horrible,” she complains.

Robert and Tisa eventually married but divorced a year later. They remain friends. Tisa will always be grateful for his support and encouragement, but for her recovery, she credits herself: “Because I made the choice to be someone.”

The learning never ends, Tisa concedes. Like to love again, from Jan-Henrik Mangold, her “second and final” husband, father of their three-year-old son Nathan, with whom she enjoys “freedom,” Tisa says, “to be who you are and to love someone just the way they are, to respect each other’s viewpoints, to listen and to be heard.”

POSITIVELY HOPEFUL

An aura of serenity surrounds Blesilda Ocampo, belying the San Francisco child support officer’s tumultuous past.

Blesilda, 41, spent her first nine professional years as a domestic violence counselor.
She knows first hand what colleagues learn from textbooks. She is living proof that family values do not preclude Filipinos from homelessness. Or incest.

“I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was eight until I was 19, when my mother died,” Blesilda reveals what has been her secret for decades. “Although my mother never protected me from my father, claiming ignorance, I felt that with her now gone, I was even more vulnerable to my father’s violations.”

School offered no refuge.

“I experienced many layers of abuse and was deeply affected by them,” Blesilda concedes. “As a student, I behaved the way unloved and abused children do: I was awkward and socially inept; the other children persecuted me.”

Wracked by fear, she ran away from home, seeking refuge with an aunt, who turned out to be “verbally and emotionally abusive.” That aunt introduced her to the man who would “father my child and become my batterer.”

“I tolerated the abuse because I did not want to return to my father’s house,” she explains. “Anything was better than what I went through at home. By then I was so conditioned to expect abuse, believing I deserved it.”

But she never lost hope.

“I believed in the heart of who I was, that I could have a better life,” she says, citing her grandmother and other people from her childhood in the Philippines who taught her how to love and that she deserved to be loved. “I carried their influence inside me like precious amulets throughout my quest for a better life.”

That belief in herself eventually drove her out of her violent intimate relationship, but it took the encouragement of a co-worker who spotted bruises on her neck and urged her to go to a domestic violence agency in San Francisco.

“That evening I picked up my daughter from day care, went to a shelter for battered women, and never returned to that man,” Blesilda recounts her flight.

Blesilda blossomed in the shelter, learning self-healing in her “first exposure to counseling.” She learned that healthy relationships, whether between parents and children or between intimate partners, are based on respect and caring, “devoid of fear and violence.” She recognized barriers to leaving abusive relationships – “fear of the unknown, of solitude, economic and social dependence on the abuser, the stigma of failing in a relationship and the belief in the nobility of staying for the sake of the children,” which she herself surmounted.

Blesilda also realized that abuse is learned and passed on by example, a truism evinced by her father, whom she thinks had been abused by priests in the Philippines.

“I saw therapists for many, many years to help me overcome the effects of the many different layers of abuse I endured as a child and as a young adult,” she confides. She told her daughter about it to “teach her to protect herself.”

Her shelter sojourn led to her becoming a volunteer and then staff counselor there. After graduating from college, she continued her advocacy with the Family Violence Project in the office of the District Attorney. She became a vocal and visible participant in the movement against the social malaise, joining the California Alliance Against Domestic Violence as it monitored domestic violence legislation. During her involvement with the SF Domestic Violence Consortium, she lobbied for the establishment of a children’s committee.

Blesilda still has difficulty talking about her past. Only when Vangie Buell shared her own story did Blesilda agree to speak publicly of her tale of triumph over tragedy to “be at peace with it and inspire others to start healing.”

FWN also honored Genevieve Dwyer, Clara Tempongko, Leni Marin of the Family Violence Prevention Fund and Cherie M. Querol Moreno of Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse as its first Vagina Warriors for their contributions to the campaign against domestic violence. CORA’s 24-hour support lines are (800)300-1080 and (650)312-8515. For more information, visit www.corasupport.org.

Blesilda Ocampo

                                                                                                                                                                               Genevieve Dwyer

Leni Marin   Clara Tempongko, mother of slain domestic                                                                                                               vicitm Claire Joyce Tempongko, holds up a symbolic                                                                                                                                   candle at an anti-domestic violence rally on the steps                                                                                                              of San Francisco's City Hall in October. Photo by Neela Banerjee.